Over the ages man has wondered what language is, how it is constructed, how one’s mother tongue differs from the languages of other peoples, and how the language of human beings differs from the signal cries of animals, and how our everyday speech differs from other media of communication in human society.

Thinking on these problems gave birth to linguistics, the science of the laws of language. Methods of investigating language improved with the development of linguistics and the accumulation of facts and knowledge. Today the latest tool is in the form of numbers and exact measures. Mathematical statistics and the theory of information, probability theory and mathematical logic, computers and sign theory are more and more coming to the aid of students of language.

That is what our story is about.

The book was translated from the Russian by George Yankovsky and was first published by Mir in 1979.